Later starts pencilled in for 2018 school days

Camera IconHalls Creek District High School principal Eliot Money.Picture: HCDHS

Halls Creek District High School is pushing back its daily start time next year after consulting with the community.

Usually the first bell rings at 7.30am but after surveying parents the school has decided to change the start time to 8.15am.

School staff hand-delivered 140 surveys and received 122 back. Seventy-seven of the papers returned were in favour of an 8.15am change.

Principal Eliot Money said data showed most of the students were walking through the doors at 7.55am and they had to be recorded as being late. “If we’re harnessing 50 per cent of that group of kids ... it’s going to change for us fairly significantly, I think it (the change) will be better in the long run,” he said.

“At the end of the day it was a balance between what we know from the data we collected and also from a lot of conversations about what are some of the reasons.”

Mr Money said starting about half an hour later would give more students time to have breakfast and get warmed up in the dry season.

The change should benefit parents who have children at the school and at the Little Nuggets childcare centre which also starts at 7.30am.

Mr Money said now there would be time for families to drop the little ones off first and then the older children.

He said school staff Rosemary Stretch, Natasha Nicols, Patricia McKay and Michelle Martin had done a solid job distributing and returning surveys. “It was important we got as many parents responding to it as we could,” Mr Money said.

“Start times have been on the school council agenda for about two-and-a-half years. It doesn’t really affect the school that much. We just had to respond to what the community wanted us to respond to.”

Mr Money said in the past community members may have felt they weren’t able to make suggestions.

“I think it’s now time we enable some of those conversations ... because at the end of the day the school serves the community, it doesn’t go the other way around,” he said.